The complex origin story of domestic cats
phys.org
phys.org
Being treated like a god will get you everywhere.
... this thread needs pictures.
[0] dog people
Maybe toxoplasmosis makes you a better person? It is my experience that cat owners are overwhelmingly nice, empathetic human beings. There does not seem to be such correlation among dog owners.
Unless you tease about toxoplasmosis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas%27s_cat
with an apostrophe. shrug
And cause it.
The UK governments approach to using normal, simple language across all its web assets is fantastic.
Llama said its in CM. Gemini said "aiming for Crystal Mark". OpenAI called its output "plain, clear" without mentioning CM. Claude didnt comment its output. Deepseek returned "Here is your passage rewritten in clear, polished English with a refined and elegant tone—what you might call "Crystal Mark English"".
I feel that medical language in the UK is dumbed down for your average (and let me reiterate again, average) person
Which is good for the majority but slightly unnerving if you don't like being talked down or wants to know what is really happening and have anything above very basic medical knowledge
But in general healthcare communication in the UK (and Ireland) do feel like they're dumbing down stuff for you
The Cat has caused extensive damage in my house. I'm still working on repairing it.
Here’s some video from four years ago https://youtu.be/rAdNJ1jczVI?si=HhB-P5lcAz3zhuMI
FWIW I'm in favor of dropping a few billion AUD into cat control programs and deploying technologies like felixer everywhere. Up until now it's just been an underfunded borderline volunteer affair.
I know they can catch pests but are they effective at controlling them? Maybe they will limit the growth of pests, so better than nothing. Most cats catch for fun rather than food I think
Maybe we had much more cats around for this purpose, if so I'd imagine there is some archeological proof.
Domestic cats do. Stray cat's hunt for a living.
Yes. Have you never heard of a barn cat? Until recently pretty much ever commercial or industrial facility large enough to have its own maintenance department typically had one or more.
>How would cats operate in these societies?
Just like a barn cat. Leave out starvation rations for it and it'll hunt for the rest.
The hunting trigger is only loosely connected to hunger — they don't get hungry then go out to hunt, they'll often see a hunting opportunity and go for it, eating the result partially/totally/not as needed. In a situation with abundant prey this will look like they are mostly hunting for “sport”.
I assume this comes from hunt availability/success being intermittent: it is better to slightly over-hunt (and slightly overeat) to keep reserves up for a lax period that might be coming.
They say that a fed cat is a better mouser, and this might be why. A truly hungry cat will prowl less to conserve energy so have less opportunistic encounters with prey.
You figure out fermentation, you change from hunter+gatherer to settled agricultural, you store grain, you need cats.
We have domesticated cows and wheat. Now their population has reached tremendous size. So has our population. We both need the other species to survive. We need them, and they need us.
You could definitely take the perspective that we have been domesticated. For example, plants have domesticated us by feeding us.
It's more of an origin story of the current lineage of domestic cats in Europe, no? It sounds like ancient Europeans would have had wildcats and older waves of domesticated felines that were mostly supplanted by the current lineage.
They also have one shared brain cell.
Source: My family is owned by a marmalade tom.
If P is 90%, 90% of males are orange, and 81% of females are orange; and 47% of orange cats are female. If P is 10%, 10% of males are orange, 1% of females are orange, and ~ 91% of orange cats are male, ~ 9% are female.
Confirmed. Very early cooperative multitasking.
Cats, in general, are less intelligent than dogs, but they are loaded with instincts, so they can act both smart and stupid, at the same time.
There's another part to their intelligence I wish we could study... multiple times I've had cats show up on my front porch as though they somehow know my house is safe. Example: several years ago a cat knocked on my door and by the time we got things detangled we understood that it lived several blocks away and likely had been in a really abusive situation. Somehow that cat understood that if came to my house it would be safe, whereas my neighbors on either side would have at best ignored it. I've now had this happen multiple time such that there is some kind of pattern - pheromones?
Hypothesis: you have (or had) at least a cat at home, while your neighbors didn't, and a cat showing up on your front porch may think "better here because at least a cat can live here, even if it triggers a territorial conflict".
That said they must be fairly well matched intellectually or we wouldn't even be able to have this discussion.
This is also equally true for black cats as the genetics works the same for them too.
However, it's more that "female cats can be tortoiseshell" and thus the ratios will get somewhere around a 2:1 ratio of male orange cats to female orange cats.
Assume that you've got 50% tortie females, 25% orange female, and 25% black female... and 50% orange male and 50% black male. You can run Montecarlo simulations on that but it will always be the case that orange (and black) cats are predominantly male because of the smaller number of options.
There's also the increased visibility of the "trouble puffs" on a male orange cat (compared to black male) and so conformation bias of "yep, that's an orange male cat."
You will appreciate:
I'm reminded of the Russian silver fox domestication experiment [1]. What's interesting about that is how quickly the species adapts characteristics making them more desirable for humans.
[1]: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/russian-foxes-tameness-d...
Humans sometimes place cats on their laps. The same happens with laptops (hence the name).
Cats and laptops are often seen inside boxes.
Cats and laptops are known to reproduce sounds that are similar to humans but not quite the same.
Future historians will be so confused.
Put them together and you have symbiosis.
This led to the 'original affluent society' paper. [2] The objections to it are quite asinine - like that cooking, cleaning, and other such time was not calculated, but of course such things also aren't counted for modern workers in their hours worked per week. Another objection being high infant mortality which again also applied, until quite recently, to industrial societies as well. It's an apples to apples comparison.
The point of this is that people in the distant past had rather extensive amounts of free time. And so them taking in some pets for fun and entertainment seems highly likely.
[1] - https://www.rewild.com/in-depth/leisure.html (in spite of the site's name this is an overview of academic literature on the topic)
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society